


The Sun that Lights the Pages

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Community: tww_minis, Epistolary, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-07-01
Updated: 2009-07-01
Packaged: 2017-10-05 08:37:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,285
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/39798
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Toby keeps a notebook; Andy takes a peek.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Sun that Lights the Pages

He keeps a notebook.

It is not quite a diary, she thinks, as she looks through it sitting cross-legged on the floor of her (_their_) attic with sunlight from the roof window streaming in over her bare feet in a hot, bright river. There are boxes all around here. His boxes. Out of them belongings have vomited up into the room, onto the floor. Part of her mind is whirring over the mess, itching to fix it and make everything straight again, but she quietens it. She sits with her back against one of the cardboard boxes, with the length of the arm of one of his shirts (not exactly freshly laundered; thanks a bunch, Toby) running out of the box's exploded top and over her shoulder and arm, and into her hand, between her fingers. Every now and then she raises the cuff of the shirt up to her face. It still bears some scent, and when she presses it to her lips it's as though this time they are busy making up for now ran away differently -- as though this scent, the textured, billowing smell of him that is warm like his hands and dark like his eyes, never left the rooms where she has been living her life.

This book -- very thick, more than four hundred pages, bound in black leather with an elastic band for holding the pages shut that is now hanging limply against her wrist as she reads -- is like a collection of moments, not organised enough to have earned the name 'diary' and too comprehensive to bear a word that implies a bare chronicling of the events of his life.

She smiles. She hears his voice in her head: _When do you think I have time to keep a diary, Andrea?_

She grins. Her mind counters with: _And wouldn't you be running the risk of some kind of security breach, anyway?_

She can't let herself gloss over the switch in his eyes, the little twinge of pain when he replies: _Too late._

She lets the book fall open in her hands a few times. Lets fate decide what she will find out. She knows she ought to worry that he will mind, be offended, feel invaded. But somehow she does not.

The pages feel precious; full of answers instead of secrets. She lets them tell her stories.

 

*

 

**(**Entry, undated, black fountain pen, something tight and anxious in his handwriting, something that strains against the fluidity of the ink.**)**

Andrea today. This afternoon.

It is baffling to me that eight hours later I am still feeling the ... what? The shock of her.

Second glass of scotch. And seven false starts on the speech.

She called me, just as I was closing up the office. It was business. It seemed to be business, as usual. It isn't.

I spent twenty-five minutes wanting to put my fingers in her hair and take off that damn pant suit jacket of hers and pull back the collar of her blouse and --

Yeah.

I don't think Ginger and Bonnie would have appreciated the interruption. We never could fuck quietly.

 

*

 

**(**Letter, folded in half and then half again, tucked into the back folding pocket of the notebook, blue ink, notepaper from the campaign he was on before Bartlet for America, smudges over some of the words that look like a spray of small droplets, and the letter smells of whiskey.**)**

Andy,

This letter is surprisingly easy to write, though you made it pretty clear that you didn't want to receive it.

Marry me.

Don't say no. Don't argue. Don't come up with a hundred and one reasons.

Leave me a Post-It on the fridge or something, but don't say no.

Marry me.

I love you.

\-- Toby.

 

A letter like this, very like this one, is hidden on the insides of her wrists, the blank whiteness of her thighs, the swell of her breasts at the side where his mouth would always leave a mark in those days when they fucked every day. He left those requests on her skin and every day that he left without asking the question the words grew closer in her, became clearer, until they burned like molten tattoos.

She knew he was going to ask weeks before he actually did. She had been bursting with the answer, like trying to swallow sunlight.

 

*

 

**(**Entry, dated in October of the year before the twins were born, black ink, steady hand, only his punctuation, which bites into the paper, gives away anything at all. The commas and apostrophes look like birds, trying to fly away.**)**

Andrea's thing today. I just got back.

At what point should an inability to not fall into bed with your ~~wif~~ ex-wife be considered pathological?

She's just as bad as me.

I've had Yeats in my head all day: "turning and turning in the widening gyre". I am standing in the eye of the storm, in the uncertain centre. I can't see anything coming clearly. We can't even discuss names for these children, just in case.

I don't want to start hoping again; I won't be able to stop.

I took the ring off. She didn't notice.

 

Andrea whispers to the floorboards: "yes i did. yes i _did_, dammit".

She noticed, and when he had gone and while she was stripping the bed because it was covered in the smell of him, his body, the remnants of his various weaknesses, she had begun to cry. It had seemed, that night, like some kind of an omen.

She had lain in that bed that was never his and tried to sleep. She had put her hand between her legs, angry, tried to make sparks out her anger. And when she couldn't come it only made her angrier: that he, for that night anyway, was something she needed, even once he had been and gone.

She had called him, at two in the morning. He had answered; he always did. She doesn't really remember what she said, only that she slept once his voice was with her, on soft, uncertain lullabies.

 

*

 

**(**Three pieces of thin, official-looking paper, folded neatly in half and stapled at the top left-hand corner, hardly touched, good as new. It is the notice of purchase for the house in D.C. Along with the papers there are two photographs, both of them taken in the spring, with the cherry blossom littering the path outside the door. In Toby's handwriting, in uneven red biro on a yellow Post-It stuck to the bottom right-hand corner of the first photo, the single word: _Tuesday_.**)**

 

*

 

**(**Entry. High quality black ink and an even hand, as though nothing could touch this calm, this place of emptiness. The date is that of the day he was fired.**)**

I called Andy and the kids. Called Pa and got Hanna instead. She managed to not say anything incredibly sarcastic on the subject of I-told-you-so, which I find remarkably restrained.

Sam, too. I think he was struggling with manly tears. He said he'd seen the newscast. He sounded sad, I suppose. I was expecting more approbation, which I suppose was foolish of me. Sam is masterful with denial. He asked me if I needed a lawyer and then got very angry when I told him who mine is. He said he'd call, anyway. I'm disgusted to know that I want him too -- I'll need the company.

The kids are coming next weekend. This is one more thing I don't know how to explain to them.

I needed her today. She can direct strength and dumbass principles much more constructively than I can. But mostly I wanted to hold her. Every day now. Every day that is left.

 

*

 

**(**Letter, undated except for the year -- 2008, notepaper that doesn't belong to this book, erratic handwriting, black biro, this page has been folded and unfolded and put into many places less salubrious than the middle pages of this journal, the grease running along its folded edges smells vaguely of cigars, tobacco, and inside the paper, hidden in its folds, are three passport sized photographs: two of the kids together, both trying to smile on cue, and one of the three of them, Toby with his arms around them, the twins on his knees, and a smile becoming fragile on his face too.**)**

Dear Huck, dear Molly,

I'm supposed to be busy right now, so don't tell anyone, okay? I'd rather sit here at home, by the window, and write to you both.

The apartment in New York misses you. So do I. The park keeps asking me, every day, when you're coming back to visit. I tell it soon. I tell the trees and the little streams, Huck's squirrel (though I'm still not convinced it isn't a different squirrel every time, son) and your little rock, Mol, your little volcano near the path. The trees are bending closer down to the paths, giving more shade to little heads. The birds seem sad, but in a hopeful way. I keep telling them -- soon.

The puppy, of course, looks at me reproachfully whenever I come home and am me and not either one of you. But he just about manages to enjoy it when we go for a walk. A couple of blocks and he forgets that I'm not his favourite. And then I give him something else he likes -- the hotdog weiners from the dogs at the stall just by the park gates. I eat the bun and everyone looks at me like I'm crazy.

But this is New York, kids, and your dad is tougher than that.

**(**the ink changes after this point, becomes blue, a thinner, sharper nib, still no date**)**

A couple of days have gone by. Apparently the world -- or at least the Politics department at Columbia -- cannot do without me for very long.

If you were here you'd be telling me (probably, you, Mol) that I shouldn't be sarcastic. So I'll apologise in advance but also mention that the war against sarcasm is a futile one in this family. Ask your mom, she'll explain.

I love you very much. I'll send this as soon as I can.

\-- Dad.

 

She gets up to wipe the tears away from her face, just in case the droplets, like the long ago traces of good, White House whiskey, should fall on the paper. She stands underneath the window and looks up into the sky, the blank blue of it. No trees, no buildings in sight. A swoop of birds pass across the square of the window. She smiles.

She wonders why this letter was never sent. It is no more tender than any of the others she has read over her children's shoulders. There is no deeper shade of vulnerability in it, but it stayed in his hands rather than flying over to theirs.

She wonders if he kept it so that the tenderness would stay along with the piece of paper; evidence of that which he is still trying, always trying, to prove to himself. The lines of sweetness and honesty, and the quietude that came after the pardon, that seeped into him like water through rock. The kids bring that out of him effortlessly, and she has watched his face wondering at that enough times, as dazzled as the first day.

The dog came with him, older now but still puppyish. He called it Princeton and Sam Seaborn, being Sam, managed to read that as an honour. She grins. Molly didn't understand why she laughed so hard when they came back from their dad's that trip and told her about the puppy. She sulked half the night until Andy told them the story. If she opens the window, if she listens, she could probably hear Molly playing with it.

The dog -- a red setter mix with sweet, silky ears that Molly strokes absentmindedly when the animal curls up, as it inevitably does, by her feet -- yelps happily. Molly's laugh cracks the sky open.

 

*

 

Toby,

**(**She writes it, in the middle of the notebook, where the pages seem to have caught a little rain somehow, where there is a stain like a light wash of light brown watercolour paint, the ink feathers a little there and she thinks that is right somehow -- some kind of inability to order these things easily, properly. She dates the page -- 10th April, 2012.**)**

I'm happy you're here. Back.

I missed you. The kids move differently with you in the house and the house itself is changing around you. This house that has never known you missed you. We change, we make something different, together. This time. The house has made a space for you, or maybe that space was always there. Waiting.

I won't try to predict -- that would probably be stupid. And fate doesn't need any extra help, right?

But I'll hope.

We haven't fucked in this bed yet. Christened it, I guess? I think we're gonna need to soon, sweetness.

You're downstairs with Huck now. Sorting through books and things you've salvaged from a hundred briefcases. I think you're scaring the kid with the breadth and depth of the legacy of paper you'll be bequeathing him one day.

I want to come downstairs and send Huck out to play with Molly and the dog. And bring you up here and ...

Yeah. You'll be getting lucky. You're really a very lucky man, Toby. (We can discuss that point in greater depth later. For now let it stand.)

I'm happy you're here.

I love you too.

\-- A.

 

*

 

She leaves the notebook, closed, on the pillow. Goes downstairs with the sun shining on her back, pushing her back. Pushing her to him.


End file.
